Selflessness in Stoicism
We as a species are caught in a predicament. We want to eat delicious food, have sex with beautiful people, be admired, acquire property, and increase our power over others.
But, no matter how much we achieve those things, it never satiates the constant yearning for more.
Why? Because desire is advantageous in the light of natural selection, but the feeling of being satiated is not. If our ancestors were totally satiated and content and never felt that yearning, they’d likely not survive to pass on their genes.
Understanding this mechanism doesn’t make it disappear. But understanding something else loosens its grip: our very sense of self as a cohesive and unitary whole is just a convenient fiction.
Desire needs an object—food, power, property, procreation, but it also needs a subject. That subject is the locus of pleasure: the self, advantageous for our ancestors—or at least the genes sequestered in our ancestors’ cells. The self is the vessel of yearning.
If we actually understand that our true identity is not a unified and coherent subject that stands apart from the world, but rather as something that is inseparable from, or braided into, the Cosmos as a whole, our cravings and disappointments lessen and could disappear entirely.
People may say, “that’s a Buddhist idea, not Stoic.” But I beg to differ. I’d like to bring your attention to any number of Stoic texts, including the first chapters of the Enchiridion, that spell out quite clearly that our common sense of self—that we are our body, our reputation, and so on—is false. The Stoic, according to Epictetus, cannot be harmed.
“But if you take for your own only that which is your own and view what belongs to others just as it really is, then no one will ever compel you, no one will restrict you; you will find fault with no one, you will accuse no one, you will do nothing against your will; no one will hurt you, you will not have an enemy, nor will you suffer any harm.”
Can YOU be harmed? Epictetus doesn’t think so, as long as you understand the Fundamental Rule. What is a self, if it cannot be harmed?
If we dissolve the very thing that desires (and therefore fears), we’ll no longer live with the nagging discomfort of never being satisfied, which will always exist as long as there is a thing—the self—that needs ever more gratification.
But isn’t that just death?
No, it’s living so fully and truly that your sense of self widens beyond breaking point. Have you ever noticed that when you’re good at a task or enjoy it a great deal, you become one with that task? You’re “absorbed” in “the flow”?
Can’t the same be said for living itself? Isn’t that what magnanimity (literally: “greatness of soul”) is? It’s realising there’s no self—that self is an idea, not a thing, and it disappears when you stop thinking about it.
So what are we, if not each a self?
We think private thoughts, we have intentions, we look up when our name is called, and we can certainly act. We are individuals, even if that individuality is conditional and contingent. But does an individual need to be fixated so much on a sense of self? We’re a bundle of stuff that’s continually changing in a changing Cosmos. Zoom out and see we’re a lick of plasma in the hearth of awareness.
By a process of negation — determining what we are not — we’ll come to a few things that cohere: judgement, desire and aversion, and intention. We deliberate, we gravitate to preferred things and avoid dispreffered things, and we set intentions for our acts.
So while your idea of self as fixed, cohesive, and unitary, is a trick of the mind that helped your ancestors survive, the Stoic’s sense of self (or non-self) is dissolved into all the things that make you an actor in the world, an agent. You are thinking itself. So that still makes you an agent—a being capable of making change happen in the world, and an agent is an individual.
So by “selfless” here, I don’t mean just selling cookies for the girl scouts or volunteering at a homeless shelter (though those things are a wonderful upshot of selflessness), I mean understanding that the line between the human being in the mirror and the rest of the world is blurry at best. It also means understanding that every want is a link in the invisible chain around your neck.
So living by reason—stepping up and owning your judgements, your desires and aversions, and your intentions—rather than from craving to craving, gives us a deeper, more fundamental happiness. It’s a happiness similar to the thoughtless flow you feel when you’re absorbed in that thing you’re good at or enjoy.
This is because we don’t get the frustration and fundamental sadness of continual unsatiated desire. It makes us more ethical too, because we don’t see our lives as “us and them” but rather as one “us”.
Does this all sound crazy? That’s the point. Stoicism is contrary to conventional thinking because conventional thinking keeps us in the wretched state we’ve already identified. That’s why Stoicism has its famous “paradoxes” (paradox literally means “contrary opinion”: para-doxa) that explain its world-view.
I’ll be writing about the Stoic paradoxes next time, so please stay tuned and subscribe if you haven’t already and want to know more.
Thank you for reading.
As you're speaking of stripping away, it reminds me of Aristotle’s First Principles. Today we apply it to products and businesses. The Stoics seem to have applied it to the individual.
Always thought provoking, thank you